Barron writes: “At the heart of Northanger Abbey is the chief mystery central to all of Austen’s work: a young woman’s effort to penetrate the veil between herself and-rather than Laurentina’s skeleton as Catherine imagines-the male half of her world” (62). In a Persuasions article centered on Northanger Abbey, Stephanie Barron, herself a mystery writer, asserts that “in the architecture of stories, discern many of the classic planks of detective fiction” (60), including a central mystery about the crimes or suspect motivations of a male character, such as Willoughby, Wickham, or Frank Churchill.

Elizabeth Mahn Nollen has written that “Ann Radcliffe’s works, especially Udolpho, stand at the forefront of a female literary tradition in which the conventions of the Gothic romance, the mystery, and the bildungsroman conjoin” (39). Nonetheless, critics have noted that certain key elements of what we now call detective fiction can be found in Austen’s novels, as well as in the novels of Ann Radcliffe that inspired Northanger Abbey. Jane Austen, of course, did not know the word “detective,” which according to the Oxford English Dictionary came into use in the 1840s. For instance, a passage from 1864’s The Female Detective that Sims includes as an epigraph states, “The reader will comprehend that the woman detective has far greater opportunities than a man of intimate watching, and of keeping her eye upon matters near where a man could not conveniently play the eavesdropper” (qtd. This obscurity might be fitting, as early practitioners of the genre turned a societal tendency to overlook or underestimate women to the lady detective’s advantage, particularly when crucial information was to be had in the domestic sphere. This language underscores how much the disputed origin point itself is shrouded in the mystery of the “anonymous,” the “barely mentioned,” and the “otherwise unknown.” Hayward anonymously published Revelations of a Lady Detective in 1864 or if the 1864 edition was a reprint of an 1861 edition barely mentioned but otherwise unknown” (xii). In his introduction to The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime, for example, Michael Sims writes: “I’m imprecise about the year because critics aren’t sure. The origins of the fictional female detective are more obscure.

The success of these nineteenth-century characters, literary historians have argued, was rooted in simultaneous curiosity about and suspicion of the solving of crime as a new full-time pursuit for a professional workforce. It doesn’t take a super-sleuth to trace the origins of the fictional male detective to Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin and, of course, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, both of whom emerged in tandem with the rise of early police forces in Britain and America.

Northanger Abbey by Nancy Butler